Episode 2 from the island expedition brings the Broken Wagon Films crew to Isla San Martín off the Pacific coast of Baja California. Elephant seals, breeding sea birds, scientists tagging snakes, rugged lavascapes, and strange endemic plants are just a few of the wonders found on this small volcanic island.

Following a route taken by several naturalists over a hundred years prior, a group of present-day adventurers embark on an expedition to document the beautiful and unforgiving landscape of today's Baja California. For more information on how to support this feature film, visit www.brokenwagonfilms.com.

Broken Wagon Films LLC is a new company being formed to produce a documentary where we retrace the steps of my great-great-great grand uncle's 1905 expedition into Baja California to catalogue the peninsula's flora and fauna. Things are still in the very early stages, but I'm sure you'll be hearing much more about this project as things develop. For now, here are some logo variations I'm working on for the production company.

Edit: I had an animated gif version of this up, until I realized how huge and annoying it was to have it looping endlessly in a blog post. It's still kind of cool though, so I put it up here instead. Apologies for any epileptic seizures that may have caused.

I recently did a very in-depth interview with A Dead Spot of Light. We talked about the inspiration behind my latest album, Vandal of Fortune, as well as the history of my music project and the influence of visual art on heavy metal.

To me the music appears to be more focussed as well. It is not as dreamy and meandering as on your previous albums. Also the increase in intensity and heaviness leave a lasting impression; Stress Fracture and Iconophage for instance. Universica was pretty sleepy and dreamy, so Vandal was meant to wake you back up. I wanted to make something that was album-based, where each song stood alone but was also part of the bigger whole and worked best when listened to as a full unit. Lots of independent artists today seem to operate on this idea of constant releases. They'll release single after single, just individual tracks, one at a time. I think it has to do with the influence of social media. Vandal was trying to get away from this. It's not just a bunch of songs, it's an album. When I was a kid, I would go to the store and buy a CD and listen to the whole thing back to back, and that's how I wanted Vandal to be. A power album that you could keep coming back to and find new things in after multiple listens.

While Universica had a considerable amount of keyboards, Vandal of Fortune is much more on the guitar side of the spectrum. Can you elaborate a bit on the idea behind this latest release of yours? Universica relied heavily on synths, and Vandal was a conscious reaction against that. I had been listening to a lot of classic heavy metal when I was writing Vandal. Lots of early metal had this really powerful simplicity that I loved. Vandal is probably my fastest and heaviest album so far, and that comes from wanting to write this kind of straight-ahead guitar-based heavy metal. In the end, it's still very melodic, but that's kind of my style.